Louise Giovanelli, Lessing’s Laocoon, & the Moving Image

Louise Giovanelli, Harmony, 2025, Photo by Michael Pollard, Courtesy of the Artist and GRIMM, Amsterdam | New York | London © The Artist

Louise Giovanelli
Still Moving
GRIMM, New York
May 9 - June 21, 2025
 

By TARA PARSONS August 31, 2025

The digital age, shaped by the instantaneity of social media and the ubiquity of film, often prompts us to question the relevance of art. While this may seem like a uniquely 21st-century concern, the relationship between the arts, specifically visual art and writing, was already at the center of 18th-century philosophical debate. One of the most notable and controversial texts of the period is Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoön (1766), which explored the distinct yet complementary capacities of the visual and literary arts. Lessing defined painting and sculpture as spatial media, best suited to depicting bodies and landscapes, while characterizing poetry and writing as temporal media, apt for narrating actions and events over time.

In light of moving images, the distinctions seem to collapse: the film unites the spatial immediacy of painting with the temporal unfolding of narrative. Yet, British painter Louise Giovanelli (b. 1993) demonstrates painting's enduring capacity to stand apart from film, resecurating Lessing’s questions for a new century.

Giovanelli, who studied at the Manchester School of Art and the Städelschule in Frankfurt under Amy Sillman, is known for her use of repetition and cropping to dislocate familiar imagery from photography, architecture, film, and art history. Across her two recent solo exhibitions at Grimm Gallery in New York—Soothsay (2023) and Still Moving (2025)—she mines the cinematic image only to suspend it, holding it apart from the forward motion of film.

Installation view, Still Moving, 2025, Photo by GC Photography, Courtesy of the Artist and GRIMM, Amsterdam | New York | London © The Artist

Soothsay featured the Entheogen series, based on a 1970s film clip of a young woman receiving the Eucharist at Mass. Large canvases in deep greens and reds isolate and repeat cropped stills of the girl’s face—mouth open, wafer on her tongue, eyes rolled back. In some, only her neck and lips are visible; in others, she appears to suck fingers. The tactile brushwork and focus on the lips invoke an almost oral fixation. As such, the girl's expression suggests spiritual rapture, sensual intoxication, or the natural slippage between them—reminiscent of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647-52). Even so, the title Entheogen, from the Greek entheos (“filled with God”), underscores this ambiguity. Stripped of narrative context, the Eucharist becomes indistinguishable from a tab of LSD; religious iconography, psychedelic states, and erotic revelation converge.

In other pieces of the Entheogen series, Giovanelli superimposes compositions or subtly alters the cropping to disrupt chronology. Removed from their cinematic flow and rendered in oil, the images become devotional, painterly, and carnal. She fractures cinematic time through repetition, converting moving images into sites of contemplative stasis.

Her 2025 exhibition Still Moving intensified this tension between stillness and narrative. Drawing from cult and countercultural cinema—including Buffalo ’66 (1997), The Brown Bunny (2003), Kids (1995), Gummo (1997), and Ticket of No Return (1979)—Giovanelli re-contextualizes female protagonists, stripping away their cinematic narratives.

Installation view, Soothsay, 2023, Photo by Lance Brewer, Courtesy of the Artist and GRIMM, Amsterdam | New York | London, © The Artist

 

In Mea Domina (2025) and Kohl (2025), Giovanelli isolates Christina Ricci’s character, Layla, from Buffalo ’66. She emphasizes Layla’s heavy blue eyeshadow and distant expression. In the film, Billy (played by Vincent Gallo) kidnaps Layla and coerces her into posing as his wife. Giovanelli’s paintings, however, transform Layla from a passive victim into a cryptic femme fatale.  On the other hand, Cinéaste (2025) focuses on Dot, played by Chloë Sevigny in Gummo. In a diptych, Giovanelli reimagines a scene with Dot’s eyes closed and mouth open, rendering her in a moment of ecstasy. The second panel blurs the same image, transforming Dot’s filmic angst into transcendence. Similarly, in Harmony (2024), drawn from Kids, Giovanelli depicts a kiss between two characters. The film, notorious for its bleak depiction of youth and the spread of HIV, centers on Telly, who knowingly infects girls, and Jennie (also played by Sevigny), who tries to stop him. While the painting captures a moment of tenderness, the disturbing subtext is absent. The title may nod to Harmony Korine, the film’s screenwriter, but it also implies a reconciliation the film denies.

Installation view, Soothsay, 2023, Photo by Lance Brewer, Courtesy of the Artist and GRIMM, Amsterdam | New York | London © The Artist

Other artworks—Le Temps Perdu (2025), Trinkerin (2025), and Prope (2025)—draw from Grey Gardens, Ticket of No Return, and The Brown Bunny, respectively. In each, Giovanelli isolates images of sensuality and subjectivity, stripping them of their cinematic contexts and transforming them into autonomous sites of contemplation. Without knowledge of the original films, these works could appear as invented tableaux. With it, their estrangement becomes even more palpable. By freezing volatile, emotionally charged cinematic moments and translating them into large-scale paintings, Giovanelli elevates the still to a site of rupture and reverie. In doing so, she reanimates Lessing’s question: What is the difference between art that unfolds in time and art that arrests it?

Lessing’s distinctions between spatial and temporal arts hinged on their different relationships to time. Giovanelli updates this argument for the 21st century, showing that even in an era when images migrate freely across media, painting and film remain ontologically distinct. Her work demonstrates how they can coexist—not as collapsed categories, but as parallel forms whose differences sharpen in proximity. In Giovanelli’s hands, painting does not merely keep pace with the moving image; it arrests it, isolates it, and allows it to resonate in ways film cannot. The still is as dynamic as the moving, and time’s suspension proves as revelatory as its flow. WM